The Bohemian Girl

Chapter TEN
‘You think he’s getting worse?’ Janet Striker said. They were gathering themselves together to leave their table at Kettner’s after a long meal full of talk and an increasing mutual understanding. She liked to eat, he found; her affection for the ABC shops was, it appeared, entirely economic. ‘I’ve been living on twenty-six shillings a week for the last ten years,’ she had said at one point, ‘and fed and clothed my mother on it, as well.’ Without bitterness, she had added, ‘The drink, she bought herself.’ When he had asked how her mother was, she had said, ‘She’s dying. I want to get her into a better place before she does - it’s another reason I want my money so soon. Poor old bitch.’
He was counting out money to pay the bill. ‘I knew a man in a prison camp who started acting like a guard.’ He looked up at her to see how she would take it. ‘I was the officer in charge of the guards. This fellow started pushing other prisoners into line at meal time. He wound up killing one of them with a club he’d made from a broken branch.’
‘I didn’t know you’d been at a prison in the war.’
‘It was after the war. Right after. Only for a couple of months. But long enough.’ He got up. ‘Shall we?’
The rain was coming down on the streets in a steady fall, more than drizzle but less than a downpour, umbrellas hurrying through Soho with legs scissoring under them. Denton started to say ‘I’ll put you in a cab,’ but amended it to ‘Do you want a cab?’
She said, ‘I’d like to go to your house for a bit, if I may.’ She smiled. ‘I like your house.’
‘But—’
‘What I said the other day, I know. It’s dark and it’s raining, so nobody will see me - how is that?’
‘“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” An American said that.’
With the horse clip-clopping along, they were both silent for the first several streets. Then, as if the darkness allowed her to say certain things, she began to talk about her life in the ‘hospital’ for the criminally insane. Her husband had put her there to crush her, but none of her hatred of him showed. She simply told him about other women she’d known. The ‘mad’, the despairing. She had a point to make. ‘Lunacy isn’t always what we’re told it is. Lunacy depends on who gets to define it.’ By then, the cab had pulled up in front of his house. She said, ‘I’m not through. Have him wait.’
They ran to the front door; inside, he shook his hat and then his overcoat; she was shaking out the ugly cape-like thing she had had on over her unbecoming dress. Atkins appeared, said ‘Good evening, madam,’ as if he had known her for years, and took their things.
‘I shall want my coat shortly,’ she said. ‘Just leave it out here.’
‘Of course, madam.’ He hung the cape on a monstrosity that combined mirror, hooks and seat.
Upstairs, she refused drink. She kept her hat on. He sat in his chair; she walked up and down, slowly and silently, beating the palm of her left hand on her upturned right fist. ‘Do you know what I was talking about in the cab, Denton?’
‘You think I should be careful when I say that Cosgrove is insane.’
‘I want you to understand what it’s like to be called insane - and to be helpless. To have “normal” people look at you with that look. To have them laugh at you. Because you’re “insane”.’
She put her right hand on his left shoulder from behind. He was staring into the coals, thinking about what she’d said; unconsciously, he put his left hand up and over hers. ‘You feel sympathy for him,’ he said.
‘I feel sympathy for you.’
‘You don’t want me to be cruel.’
They were silent. He could feel the pulse of his own thumb where it rested against her hand, under it the heat of her skin. She said, ‘Why do you live in England?’
He was silent for many seconds. ‘I suppose I prefer to be an outsider.’ He turned his head a little towards her. ‘Like you.’
‘I’m not one by choice. Or I wasn’t to begin with, anyway.’ She put her left hand on his and traced the big veins with her fingers. ‘Did you really kill four men?’ she said.
‘Yes. Plus the one you saw last year.’
‘Do you think about them?’
‘I killed them because I wanted to. Or I chose to - I chose to be marshal in that little town. I chose to be there when he tried to hurt you. I don’t have regrets, if that’s what you mean. My regrets are that somebody has to make such choices.’
‘Why do you mind Albert Cosgrove so much?’
‘Because I hate being spied on! I hate - somebody pushing into my life. It isn’t that I have something to hide - everybody has something to hide. It’s that - it’s like having a room where nobody is supposed to come, a place to retreat to. And that’s where I am. Nobody else is supposed to go in there.’
‘Then why can’t you understand when I say the same thing to you?’
‘I’m trying, Janet. It’s as hard for me as I suppose it is for Albert Cosgrove.’
She let her hand rest on his for several seconds. She said, ‘Would you like me to spend the night?’
He spun in the chair. ‘You know I would.’
‘Well—’ She was pulling out the long pins that held her awful hat. ‘You’d better pay off the cab, then.’
Waking, his dream stayed and could be captured: it was the house he had built in Iowa again, the environment of the bad dreams, but this was different, somehow radiant. He woke with a great feeling of contentment, almost triumph, perhaps triumph over the bad dreams of the past. He had been in that house, looking out of the window where he always saw her walking to her death, but this time she wasn’t there. It was his pasture, but it was full of horses; he’d owned only one horse back then, and it had never been in the dream, but here was a field of horses that ran, a kind of joy in their trailing manes and kicked-up tails. He went out - always in these dreams he went out, down to the pasture gate, over the slight rise, and there she would be with the lye jug beside her. But he felt no dread this morning. He walked over the rise and the herd of horses pounded by him, and where she had lain there was only the bleached, clean skeleton of a horse. And he was so grateful.
‘Janet?’ he whispered.
She was there, her bare hip an astonishing presence under his hand. She moved but stayed asleep. Denton lay next to her, revelling in the dream. The surprise of it. Then he heard Atkins coming up from the basement level with the morning tray; he scrambled out of bed, pushed his feet into slippers, realized he was naked - usually, there’d have been a nightshirt - and grabbed a shirt and trousers. Closing the bedroom door behind him, he heard her stir.
He met Atkins halfway up the stairs. He said, ‘Mrs Striker has spent the night.’
Atkins looked at him. He showed no expression. Handing Denton the tray, he said, ‘You’ll need another cup, then,’ and turned and went down the stairs. When Denton went back to the bedroom, she was gone, sounds coming from the bath next door. He put the tray down, ran his furry tongue over his teeth, made a face. Pouring himself a cup of tea, he went down the hall to the extra room and hid there until she came out, then went into the bath and made himself more or less presentable. When he went back into the bedroom, she was standing at the window with a cup of tea, wearing an almost floor-length dressing gown of his over her long body. She said, ‘This is the first time I’ve done this with a man I like. It’s very nice.’
‘“Very nice” doesn’t catch it.’
‘No.’
He stood behind her, pulled her lightly against him, aware that any of the usual behaviours - joking, talking about it, trying for more - were unwise. She said, ‘I don’t know what we do now.’
‘We could marry.’
‘Never. I’ve told you. Not even you.’ The tone was light. ‘I won’t be put in bondage again.’
‘Live together?’
‘It wouldn’t work, Denton. You can’t keep it a secret, and people won’t tolerate what they’d call a scandal. I don’t know why it’s a scandal, two people our ages who like to be together, but it is. People you like would drop you, wouldn’t speak to you.’
‘Do you think I care?’
‘I would, and then you would.’
‘We could go somewhere else.’
‘Yes, Florence is favoured for that sort of thing. Or Deauville. A little expatriate colony of the unchaste. We’d disgust ourselves and each other. Who’s that in your garden? Oh, good heavens, it’s Cohan. I thought for a moment—’
He craned his neck and looked past her. ‘You see how it is when you have an Albert Cosgrove? Always looking behind you.’
She folded her arms over the one of his that was around her waist, then shuddered.
‘What is it?’
‘You and me.’ She broke away. ‘Now I must dress and find a way to face your servant. Can he be trusted?’
‘He’s made his living being trusted.’
‘Let’s hope so.’ She kissed him lightly. ‘Go away while I dress.’
He almost said something about the dress, about all of her clothes - something about his buying her new ones - and wisely stopped himself. His grandmother had often told him to mind his own beeswax. The way Janet looked, dressed, acted, talked, was her own beeswax. The beeswax was in fact, he thought, her poverty, but she would let him into that room only when she was ready.
Anyway, he wanted to think over what she had said about insanity and Albert Cosgrove.
Atkins, of course, was perfect with her. They breakfasted; Denton kissed her; she left.

Two more letters came from Albert Cosgrove that day. The first apologized for the one of two days before; he’d been ‘nervously agitated’ and not himself. Denton wondered what it meant to Albert Cosgrove to be ‘himself’.
The second letter was quite the opposite - angry; it returned to the earlier tone.
I trusted you, I respected you, and now you have turned on me in this treacherous manner. I know what you are doing! You are worn out; your mind has got rusty and slow; you want my novel as new blood to freshen your own. You have become degenerate. GIVE ME BACK MY BOOK!!!!! If you do not return it, I will have recourse to English law. Or worse. There are quicker ways to the recovery of what is mine than the lawyers.
Denton turned the letters over to Atkins. ‘Send them to Sergeant Markson at the Met. I can’t be bothered now.’ Albert Cosgrove was more right than he knew, Denton thought - having tried to rewrite his novel too fast, he did feel worn out, rusty and slow.
Atkins was reading the letters. ‘How does he suppose you’d return his slop, even if you had it? He never gives an address.’
‘Maybe it never occurs to him. He wants the book; it should be made to appear.’
‘Like a kiddie with the tit - bawling until it gets stuck in his maw. Bloody loony!’
Denton waved a hand at him to get him out of the room. When Atkins was gone, he sat on, his head leaned on his left hand, staring down at the manuscript - portrait of the author at his desk, by our artist, he thought. The morning’s contentment was of course gone. The novel had reached the worst of the marriage, deeply personal scenes that came in good part from his own life and were preserved in the ambers of guilt and humiliation. The morning’s dream, its sense of release, made the writing harder, even the memory of contentment a distraction. And Janet Striker was a distraction, too. Instead of working, he sat and wondered why he was so drawn to her: she wasn’t pretty; she was sometimes distant; she went out of her way not to be compliant. Yet he wanted her - more than any woman in a long time, perhaps ever. She didn’t intend that it would be easy, he knew - although she had asked to stay, had said she wanted to, and had proved so during the night.
I think that I don’t want it to be easy, either.